Abstract

Both public and private schools in the Philippines are using information
technology (IT) as a tool to improve teaching and learning. While
both government and private sector initiatives indicate national commitment
to IT in education, there is little up-to-date information on how
extensively the Philippines are using computers and for what purposes.
The researcher s goals were to determine the extent to which Metro
Manila public and private schools used IT and to determine how these
results compared with analogous data on schools in other developing
and developed countries. The researcher gathered data with mail-in
questionnaires adapted from the International Association for the
Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), onsite visits, and follow-up
telephone interviews. The researcher also compared her results with
those from IEA-surveyed countries.

The researcher determined that actual uses of IT did not meet
schools curricular goals. Although school officials wanted IT to
individualize instruction, promote active learning, and improve
student achievement, in actual practice, schools used computers
to teach computer literacy, productivity tools, and programming.

In terms of infrastructure, the researcher found that schools
in Metro Manila had the poorest student-to-computer ratio in comparison
to schools in IEA-surveyed countries. Metro Manila students access
to peripherals was also poor. Software selections were limited to
productivity tools. Students in Metro Manila primary schools, like
their counterparts in IEA-surveyed countries, had limited Internet
access.

A comparison of results from public and private schools revealed
that public and private schools shared many educational goals regarding
the use of IT. However, the realization of these goals was uneven.
Private schools had been using computers for a greater number of
years than public schools. Private schools had lower student-to-computer
and student-to-printer ratios. They also had greater Internet access.
Furthermore, private schools tended to expose their students to
computers at practically all educational levels.

The study provided baseline data that was not previously available.
The researcher identifies the need for similar studies with greater
geographic scope or of a longitudinal nature, deeper investigations
of curricular gaps or policy issues, and the development of instructional
software for Filipino-specific subject areas.

About The Author

Maria Mercedes T. Rodrigo is an assistant professor at the Ateneo de Manila Univerisity in Quezon City, Philippines.
Her area of specialization is technology integration in education.

Top Dissertations

1930

by Kurt Gödel at University of Vienna

Best known for the completeness of the first-order predicate calculus, a theorem first presented in his doctoral dissertation of 1929 (and a rewritten version of the dissertation, published as an article in 1930), now commonly know as Gödel's completeness theorem. To prove this theorem, Gödel developed a technique now known as Gödel numbering, which codes formal expressions as natural numbers. His theorems ended a half-century of attempts, beginning with the work of Frege and culminating in Principia Mathematica and Hilbert's formalism, to find a set of axioms sufficient for all mathematics. He is considered one of the most significant logicians in human history, with Aristotle and Frege, Gödel made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when many, such as Bertrand Russell, A. N. Whitehead and David Hilbert, were pioneering the use of logic and set theory to understand the foundations of mathematics.